No Stupid Questions - 16. What’s the Downside to Being Goal-Oriented?

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

Also: how does a cook become a chef? With Gabrielle Hamilton.

You know, the ages of your kids, the name of your spouse. I have kids. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, do super driven people miss out on some of life's greatest joys? Are we not eating enough ice cream cones and feeling the sand between toes? All those things just make me cringe a little bit, I have to say.

Also, what is the difference between an art and a craft? With acclaimed chef and writer Gabrielle Hamilton. This is a freaking delicious roast chicken. So, Stephen, lately I have been thinking about the dark side of grit, and in particular how being goal-directed in the extreme can be a bad thing. If you are spending a large proportion of your 168 hours per week pursuing goals, you may be spending fewer hours savoring the present moment, being mindful. Savoring the present moment, being mindful. So these strivers who are rushing around getting stuff done are maybe less happy.

Maybe they're just missing out. Right. I mean, let me ask you this. In a given day, what percentage of time that you're awake, do you think you are having goal-directed thoughts versus the percentage of time where you have no goal in mind. You're just maybe like eating a really good piece of brisket. Huh, that's interesting. So at the risk of shortchanging your brisket, I'm going to say between 90 and 95. I am going to go with the same ballpark answer.

I gave myself like 95% in that tiny little sliver of time where you're not pursuing some goal, even if it's making dinner for the night or what. What are you doing? Can you think of those rare moments where you're not in goal pursuit? Yeah. So maybe I'm more like between 85 and 90. I can't be Duckworth level. So what I'll do, let's say I am sketching out my workday. I try to arrange it in a kind of order or a pattern that I know will have some flow to it because if there's work of a certain intensity, I have to chunk that up. So I will literally sit down and draw up a little timetable.

Like for 28 minutes, I'm going to do nothing but have my eyes and brain on this puzzle I'm trying to solve. Then I reward myself with maybe three to five minutes that I actually do time on my watch. And in those three minutes, I might use it to play part of a backgammon match. I might use it to check the score of some sporting event that I care about. So I'm very goal-oriented, but I don't feel like, at least the way you originally framed the question, that I'm missing out by not savoring. I truly don't feel that. Okay. Well, first of all, that's very similar to, have you ever heard of the Pomodoro technique? No, but it's one of my least favorite spaghetti sauces. Oh, Pomodoro. Is it the same as marinara or is it different? Nobody really knows.

Nobody knows. The Pomodoro technique was invented by, I believe, an Italian engineer who had a problem with procrastination. And so he would set his kitchen timer, which I guess was a plastic tomato, but he's Italian, so pomodoro instead of tomato. He would set it for, say, 20 minutes or 25 minutes, and then he would really work during that time. And the timer was keeping track of when this time would be up, as opposed to if you had no timer, you would have to keep track of it yourself, and you'd constantly be looking at the clock, and that would be distracting. So when the alarm goes off, you know that you're done your little work stint. And then he would set the timer again for like five minutes and take a break just like you would.

You're telling me I've been Pomodoro-ing this whole time and I didn't even know it had a name. Plagiarism or just convergent evolution. And maybe my question was like about how long would you set a Pomodoro timer? Maybe some people would be like, oh, I'm going to set it for 15 and then take a 15 minute break, and you're 27.3. Well, that's what I aspire to is the 27.3. But it's interesting you say you become aware of the time by measuring it. For me, I realize that my estimate of time is horrible. Sometimes it seems much longer, and sometimes it seems much shorter. And what that tells me is that when your mind is engaged, time really does become almost a different chemical

state. Well, for human beings, the perception of time requires attention. And so flow, the state of being completely absorbed in what you're doing, time can get distorted in either of those directions. So maybe this Pomodoro technique enables you to take whatever attention you would have had on the passage of time and really just do whatever you're doing for whatever it is that you set your timer for. What you're describing, I think, explains why when I have reading that I really need to absorb, I much, much, much prefer reading on paper still. I can take it to a place where I can focus. So when I hear people talk about like they're not able to get their work done because of distractions from texts or email or Facebook or whatever, to me, the solution is pretty obvious,

which is make it impossible for those intrusions to happen if you truly want to work toward your goal. That kind of obviousness to you, you're like, well, why don't you take the distractions away? Why don't you set your watch for 27 minutes? You know, that gets me back to my original question, which is at what cost does your successful navigation of this dilemma come? In other words, you are now plowing through lots of work and doing it really effectively. And I know you love your work. Right, so what are you missing out on by doing that?

It's your question. Yeah, what are you missing out? I mean, I haven't seen my family in eight years. Does that count? Yeah, exactly. If you know the ages of your kids, the name of your spouse. I have kids.

I will say this, for most of the past six months, I've been working at home with my whole family around and it's very different. When you're thinking or writing or reading or interviewing someone, it's not great to have someone just come in and say, hey. But then once it was obvious to me the shape of the family interaction going forward, I just kind of changed the rules in my head. And I said, you know what? Whenever anybody wants to do anything or to talk about anything, since we're in this unusual circumstance, I'm just always going to say yes to it.

And if it starts to get trivial to the point of I'm getting interrupted 30 times in an hour to talk about whether that cloud looks like a rabbit or an aardvark, then I might say, I'm going to take a break from the interruptions now and focus on the work. And I found that we found a sort of natural stasis there. And I have to say, it's been really fun. I feel like I haven't been less productive, but my productivity comes in more little chunks over a long period of time rather than in big chunks over a shorter period of time. So first of all, that sounds lovely. And second of all, it doesn't sound like you have wrestled

with this existential question of whether many years from now on your deathbed, you will have regrets. You've heard this very famous thing. Apparently, there was a hospice nurse who asked many of her patients, what do you regret? And famously, nobody said, I wish I spent more time at the office. I hate that response. Can I tell you why? Yes, go ahead, please. I think, well, what are you doing in your office? And it doesn't have to be an office. It could be a studio, could be your living room, could be your garden, whatever it is you do. It doesn't have to be an office. It could be a studio, could be your living room, could be your garden, whatever it is you do.

If it's a job you hate, then of course, I don't mean to be ignorant of the fact that many people's work is nothing but a chore. When you look at the data on satisfaction with work, you see that most people around the world, work is nothing but a way to earn money. Survival. And that's a bummer. You and I are very fortunate, and I think we appreciate our good fortune, but I also think it stinks that society is organized in a way that so many people dislike their work. So anyway, when people say no one on their deathbed ever said,

I wish I'd spent more time in the office, I think, well, I don't know if I'm a cancer researcher, or if I'm a set designer, or if I'm a writer. And I think there were those days when I thought, man, I'm just going to go for a walk today. I'm just going to sit around and listen to music today. No, maybe I should have. So I'm of one and a half minds about that saying. I completely agree. And so I started this question by saying, what would be the dark side of too much grit or like too much of a goal directed focus? Are you missing out on the present? Are we not eating enough ice cream cones and like feeling the sand between toes at the beach?

All those things just make me cringe a little bit, I have to say. I'm with you. And I have been thinking about it because maybe there's something that you and I are just oblivious to. Missing. Yeah.

Look, I think you're right. And I appreciate what you're saying. I think that you and I probably do define ourselves a lot and maybe too much by our vocations. I will say this though, one of my favorite sayings in life was something my mom would say when we kids, so there were a lot of kids and very few resources, monetary and otherwise. And we kids, so there were a lot of kids and very few resources, monetary and otherwise. So there was naturally a little bit of complaining, right? Like, why are all my clothes hand-me-downs?

Why is all our food homegrown food and home-baked bread and tastes terrible, etc., etc., etc.? And my mother had a phrase, and the phrase was, enough is as good as a feast. And the phrase was, enough is as good as a feast. And even though the phrase connotes food and eating, I think as a life parallel, it's even better. And I think about it all the time. In economic terms, you think about diminishing returns. And this goes back to our conversation about maximizing versus satisfying. We think that maximizing will bring outsized rewards that we can savor and will make us feel a different category of satisfaction. I'm not saying anything that philosophers haven't identified before, which is the key to happiness is being happy with what you've got, not with having to always cast your eye on a new goal. So it sounds to me like on the Pomodoro Tune, when you set it to 27 to do work that you love, you're very happy in those 27 minutes.

Just to be fair, I'm sometimes miserable. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult. But there's a gratification that you find in your work. And if I have this right, you're pretty happy with the three minutes you have to be completely unplugged, not goal directed, just sort of futzing around on your backgammon game, etc. And you don't want to change this to be 15-15. Your 27-3 is a feast for you. Is that right? I think that's about right. Yeah. I mean, look, everybody finds a way to arrange their lives to make themselves as happy as they can given their circumstances and resources, right? Yeah. Given their constraints. I don't need my pattern to look like your pattern.

You don't need your work to look like my work to be happy and so on. So I've got my Pomodoro, but you don't have to. Me Pomodoro, Sue Pomodoro. And I say, I'm good with 28 too, actually. And I think I'm going to stick with my Pomodoro, just set the way it is. Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen takes a break while Angela goes one-on-one with recipient of the James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York City, Gabrielle Hamilton, about being a self-taught chef, turning insecurity into confidence,

and having to close her restaurant due to the global pandemic. We're going to sit down here and make beautiful plates while everyone here is going to hell in a handbasket. Hi, Gabrielle. I'm so glad that you're joining me. Can you introduce yourself to our NSQ listeners? I'm Gabrielle Hamilton, and I'm the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant in New York City and a columnist for The New York Times. I am dying to ask you a question that has actually been simmering as I read through

essays that you've published in The Times, and of course, I read Blood, Bones and Butter. Chefing, if it's even a verb, chefing, it seems to me as a non-chef that it requires a multiplicity of skills that don't necessarily go together in the same people. To be a great chef, you're creative, you're interested in food, you love feeding people, but also you have to somehow manage people and deal with finances and investors. What does the word chef mean to you? I mean, chefing is the greatest verb. We often say like someone needs to chef this meeting because it's not going well. The chef is the chief, the leader, the big boss. I don't like to throw it around. Even when I opened my own restaurant, I didn't call myself a chef for the first 10 years. And frankly, I wasn't one. Even though

I was running a restaurant, I referred to myself as a cook. There was a time when I started to realize I'm allowed the title now. I am the chief here for sure. is the reason why the outliers are so outside the distribution is because they are able to be, say, in the top 10% on like eight different skills that you need to be successful in this overall endeavor. So running a restaurant, being the chef of a restaurant, there's so many qualitatively different things that you have to do at least pretty well, if not really well. So what's your perspective on this? Because if that is the case, it's rare then to have all those things. Yeah, to be a chef and to be a great chef are two different things. Several years ago, I did a

dinner at WD-50, Wiley Dufresne's restaurant in New York. And it was a veritable, unreal, who's who of the greatest chefs in the world. Wait, you made the dinner? I was part of the group, the team that went and did this dinner. It was Rizepi. It was Daniel Humm. It was all the Swedish and Nordic. The international luminaries. It was unbelievable. Someone, inic. The international luminaries. It was unbelievable. Someone, in fact, wrote that should there have been a fire in that building, the world's 50 best would have gone down. I was literally thinking that.

I was like, I hope nothing happened. The future of food. It was just a chef fest, a cluster F of the world's greatest chefs. of the world's greatest chefs. And everyone's working on their apple that explodes into pearls and their smoked seagull poop or whatever the hell they're working on in all their little corners. And no one is wearing a chef jacket.

Everyone's in their t-shirt and no one has their hair pulled back. And Daniel Boulud walks in, in his tight, crisp white jacket, his creased pants, his loafers. Salut! Bonjour, everyone! Hello! And in 10 seconds, it was like dad's home because someone had to actually chef the goddamn party. Somebody had to chef the party. Somebody had to chef the chefs. And no one was doing it.

Everyone was sort of being their creative genius over in their little corners and their tweezers and their smoke machines. And it took Danielle, who was like, let's go. What's the run of show? How is this going to go? Like chop, chop. And it was so fun to watch all the people in the room sort of stand up straight. I think that's what chefing is. In addition to all that creativity, all the fish have to swim in the same direction. You have to honor all kinds of individuality and at the same time get a group to work in common purpose.

individuality and at the same time get a group to work in common purpose. The expectations have to be made explicit and you have to teach. So first of all, I think I understand better what this verb that we both like really means. I think in the French, what does it mean actually head, right? The chief. The leader, the chief. And no one teaches you to be a leader. It's one of the worst spots for a cook who's been promoted to sous chef because that is the first time you are really in charge of the crew and just about everything that has to happen in a restaurant. You've taught them all the practicalities of what goes in the recipe or what the dish should look like, etc. But what you don't often find a sous chef getting is a lot of education about how to bring a group together.

It's often people's first experience with power, which is like a freaking atomic bomb, and a lot of people mishandle it. When you first transitioned, I guess, to some version of a chef with this additional and very different responsibility, Did you like it? The problem with me is that I am a bossy person in general. Samesies. I also have that sort of adherence to excellence that drives me crazy. And so I had already become accustomed to not making any friends. When I used to chef situations that I had no business chefing. When I worked in catering kitchens, it's kind of a mayhem,

a sort of every man for himself. Sometimes there's no clear chef in a catering kitchen. And so you're just watching one guy making Buche de Noel the way they think it should be made. And someone else is like roasting turkeys the way they think the turkey should be roasted. It's like parallel play with kids. And it's my nature.

I can't really help it. I am just like, that turkey doesn't look good. And so I have struggled with my innate chef-ness long before I ever became a chef by realizing, huh, I'm alone crying in the van because I didn't make any friends today. And yes, it mattered to me that the turkeys were perfect, but how can I not feel so alone? How can I get the product the way it has to be for me by my standards without feeling left out? And absolutely, like I've ruined relationships or

that everyone's standing 10 feet away from me or no one's going to invite me out for a drink after work. And so I would say I learned really the hard way. And one of the things that I really cherished about owning my own restaurant was that I got to shepherd people through those brutal experiences that I had done on my own, teaching people, like, if you just move your cutting board a little closer here, you don't have to lean over so far. Or if we could just raise this up, then you don't have to hunch over so hard. Can I ask then, maybe there was a time earlier in your career where you'd go back in the van and cry because you didn't make any friends that day, but that is because the product came out excellent.

Then if I'm hearing you right, later, and maybe especially at Prune, there was a flip. So the emphasis was on the people and less about the product. Do I have that right? I would say that it's maybe what you were talking about is you get good at eight things or something, and that's what determines excellence. I would add it into the braid of my work life so that you don't triage constantly like, well, the food's going to suck today, but man, is this team going to be strong or am I going to be well-liked? It's a constant braiding in of new things, which is actually very natural in a way. Look, cooking is very repetitive. You boil a lot of water every day.

This is how I would entertain myself. I would work this station at brunch. I would work the front station. And you're doing a lot at the front. You're splitting and toasting, oh, about 540 English muffins in five hours. Especially for your famous brunch. And you're calling the tickets and you're assembling the plates and putting them in the window. But over time, once you have the hang of all those things, I would look around like,

how am I going to up my game? I got this. What's next? And I used to set these goals and meet them and they were, I will finish this insane brunch shift with not a single stain on my apron, or I will finish this brunch shift and there will be no crumbs from the English muffins on the floor in my station. And so I consider teaching the line cook how to be a good line cook and the advanced line cook to become a sous chef part of the braid of, we should be more money savvy in here too. And I should have some friends at the end of the day and the food should be exquisite. And I should know a little something about lighting in a dining room. For some reason, the people at the bar are not glowing the way I'd like them to. That makes total sense. You're just adding. So you're a writer and you're a chef. And

I think you once said that writing a book was like a bajillion times harder. Can you tell me, like, what is the same for you between writing and cooking and what is different? I would say that the only sameness between writing and cooking is my need to know what the F I'm doing and feel professional and legitimate doing it. One is so solitary and so almost unachievable. That's the writing one, right? One is so solitary and so almost unachievable. That's the writing one, right? Yep. And that's also because I come with such reverence for it.

And it means so much to me. Whereas cooking, I'm like, ah, this comes pretty naturally. And I know it's tasty. And it can be light for you. That's right. It's very like, this is a freaking delicious roast chicken. Let's agree that this is just tasty. Yeah. Yum.

Let's eat it and then we'll be gone. You said cooking is a craft, not an art. So for you, writing is an art. I really wanted to know what you even mean by that, that something can be a craft and not an art. No matter how beautiful the plate, no matter how exquisite the craftsmanship, no matter how attentive to detail of the color scheme or the

textural contrasts in one's mouth, I'm steadfast in the camp of, you think that's art, buddy? Why don't you lock yourself in a room and try writing a poem that moves someone? You know, there are these two motivational tendencies that psychologists call approach versus avoidance. And some people would say, like, I work so hard because I have all these approach goals. Like, I want to do this. Other people would say, I work so hard because I'm avoiding failure. I don't know how you do it. You're a good cook and you're a good writer. And how do you be good at so many things? Like, oh, it's so easy. You just need parents who didn't love you. And so you just spend the rest of your life, like working harder and harder and harder, like, please notice me. I'm good enough. All you have to do is sort of breathe and your parents love you like that is not the household in which we grew up and I would say we had some psychological dynamics of an even darker stripe particularly with our father and you're raising your two kids totally differently right of course I'm sure I'm screwing them up in in my own special way I was gonna say are they

gonna be like really happy sluggers? Totally. I don't know who said it, but you want to give your children just enough trauma, a little trauma. A tincture. So they've got some texture. Do you think that being somebody who's so driven to excellence and who cares so much about the details, et cetera, do you think that's causally related to insecurity or are those really just like different parts of you? The confidence is that I do have, ironically, come from having all of the same fears and insecurities and terrors and senses of inadequacies as anyone, if not even more so, but having faced them. And so I don't know if you're allowed to say this without sounding like an asshole, but I find myself brave to have faced

the things that terrify me or that I think I'm going to fail at, etc. You hold your breath and you squint and you're just sort of like, I'm going in. It's like jumping into an ice cold lake off of a very tall rock and you're not sure what's at the bottom. And some people just sort of back down and like, I think I'm not going to take that risk. And having, I think, jumped into enough of those cold lakes, I developed some confidence,

but it doesn't mean I don't struggle with tremendous insecurity. I have to ask a lot of questions and make sure I have a lot of answers before I finish an endeavor. That's why it takes me so long to write. I can probably only manage a book every five years because I'm so afraid I'm going to get it wrong. Can you share an example of a past or present insecurity or fear like, yep, that was an icy lake I jumped into not knowing the

bottom of? Sure. First thing that comes to mind is about writing. Do you write? I only wrote one book and I'll never write another one because it nearly killed me. I think people mistake writing as having a way with words, but actually writing is thinking and writing on the page, it reveals the organization of your mind and your heart, frankly. And so to put that in draft form in front of someone who's going to edit and receive that material for me is like being caught absolutely naked and not good naked, not like, oh, I've had a shower and I trimmed. It's like ugly naked, like I've been puking in the bathroom on a hangover naked. When I read the New York Times essay that you wrote during the pandemic about the closure of Prune, I did want to ask, do you know what you're doing next? Prune could reopen, right?

For now, it's officially legal to have indoor dining. And I don't know if you know our block. I don't. It's a very short block and we have some empty lots that breed rats. And then we're on top of a subway station that's hollow where rats like to live. So to open outdoors, to me, would be like repulsive. You could start the bubonic plague to add on to the coronavirus. I can just imagine like you get your tables all set up and your little potted ferns going and then there's a rainstorm and the cockroaches are going to come up out of the sewer drain. Not only would that be sort of bad for

business, but who would I be? Like, no, we're going to sit down here. Have brunch. Make beautiful plates. Eggs Benedict. While everyone here is going to hell in a handbasket. You know, I see a lot of signs on storefronts in my town, which is Philadelphia, that say I'm retiring. You've titled your book, Blood, Buns and Butter, The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. You've said that you didn't growing up think that cooking was going to be your passion, that at a pretty early age, you wanted to be a writer. So I wondered whether you would also take the opportunity to exit off of the restaurant highway.

It's a great opportunity. And of course, I'm contemplating it constantly. And I happen to like change. Change doesn't terrify me. So I am embracing the time and the opportunity to really think and recalibrate and understand who I am and who I'm not. But I must admit that I'm still a little bit in shock. The shock waves of such an intense and seismic shift, I need them to settle a bit before I'm able to sort of think again about what will come. I don't want to be playing this one stringed violin just because I played a violin for 20 years. It's not to say that I can't again make beautiful music. I think I can get that going again at some future time, but I don't want to be playing my old one-stringed violin. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network,

which also includes Freakonomics Radio and people I mostly admire. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of today's conversations. In the first half of the episode, Angela asked Stephen the difference between Pomodoro and marinara sauce. And Stephen says, quote, no one really knows. I, however, do know, thanks to a quick Google search. You cut tomatoes when making marinara sauce,

but mince them for Pomodoro. The result is that Pomodoro sauce is thicker and smoother, whereas marinara sauce is runnier and chunkier. Later on, Stephen and Angela discussed the story of the hospice nurse who reported that very few of her patients felt that they should have spent more time in the office. The nurse in question is Australian palliative care provider, Bronnie Ware, author of the 2012 memoir, The Top

Five Regrets of the Dying. In the book, Ware writes that the five most common regrets she came across were as follows. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. I wish I'd let myself be happier. And finally, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Interestingly, Ware shared that this last regret was mostly from men who felt that work had caused them to miss out on their children's youth and their partner's companionship, and likely had fewer opportunities to bond over a cloud's resemblance to a rabbit or an aardvark. That's it for the Fact Check. No Stupid Questions is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, James Foster, and Corinne

Wallace. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music. If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can also follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show. Also, if you heard Stephen, Angela, or Gabrielle refer to something that you'd like to learn more about, you can check out Freakonomics.com slash NSQ, where we provide links to all of the major references you heard here today. Thanks for listening. I'm just going to mix a thousand metaphors because it's a problem I have. The Gettysburg Address has like so many mixed metaphors. I'm like, dude, it worked for Lincoln. How bad can it be?